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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Homemade Hand Soap and Dispenser

You may remember a couple of days ago (in this post) when I showed you a gift basket of homemade items that I made for my sister in law. Today I thought I would share a little about one of the items in that basket!

Next time I make a batch of hand soap (which will not be for a while...I will show you why!) I will be sure to take step by step pictures to share with you guys. Basically, you find a bar of soap that you really like. You use a cheese grater to grate said bar of soap (4 oz is plenty unless you add more water). While you are grating the soap, heat a gallon of water on the stove just until it is steaming. Once it steams, remove it from the heat and pour in your ground soap. Let it sit for 15 minutes. After that, you will need to whip it with a hand mixer until it is well stirred. This is what mine looked like:

After this step it will need to sit for a minimum of 15 hours, overnight is best. In the meantime I decided to start working on my dispenser. I took a cute little smooth side mason jar.

And a soap pump that I had been saving for a project such as this.

Now the fixtures in their house are all Oil Rubbed Bronze, so I wanted to make this match. I taped off the pump head (paint would rub off with use) and the straw to the pump like this:

And I took it as well as the jar lid outside and sprayed them with Krylon ORB spray paint. In the meantime, my soap had been settling long enough. Now is the harder part (which is still not hard). The soap should be a big squishy blob in your bowl. Take your hand mixer and beat it well until it is smooth consistency like hand soap. It will probably form a froth on top like mine did. If it is too solid you can add just a little more water to thin it a bit. That is all you have to do!

I had my husband drill a hole in the lip of my jar to slide the pump through.

Then I simply used hot glue to secure the pump in place.

I filled my jar with soap and voila! A super cute Mason jar soap dispenser! I plan to make another one soon but witha cute twist! Can't wait to share it!

Now the reason I will not have the need to make soap to show you is this:

Yep! AFTER filling that large Mason jar, I still have a gallon of hand soap! I added a bit of lotion to this recipe by the way. It was just an unscented moisture cream. Made the texture so smooth! I highly recomment this recipe! So easy and you can totally choose your scent!